Stellaluna
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Stellaluna
This is a curious picture book about a fruit bat, separated from its mother, who is adopted by a family of birds. The text is, at turns, affectedly lyrical and straightforwardly twee: the fruit bat is Stellaluna; the baby birds are Pip, Flitter and Flap. The illustrations are meant to be charming and striking but are self consciously posed, like studio photographs. The foreground is bathed in light and the background disappears. You have no idea that the bat lives in a tropical or semi-tropical environment (as the 'Bat notes' at the back say it does). And what are these (dull grey) tropical birds? The book may appeal to pre-school and infant children but I feel the production is calculated more to impress their doting parents (and the reviewers from the Sunday papers quoted on the cover).
